If Kingdom Hearts was a college course, just laying out its syllabus would take up damn near the entire semester.

Ya know, I thought something like that too. But honestly? At this point? I think the fact that the franchise a bit of an apoplectic mess is one of the selling points.

I don’t know if you realize just how many people struggle with English as their first language.

Hey, if you’re enjoying yourself, embrace it.  Not everything needs to be a masterclass in storytelling and/or gameplay.  If you like this train wreck, you’re not hurting anybody.  Load up the next trolley and let ‘er ride!

Well, this is where I have to remind myself that Nomura is not a storyteller by trade. He’s an artist by background. This isn’t necessarily or even normally a problem, for what it’s worth; in fact, some of the world’s best storytellers aren’t classically trained writers.

That remains my biggest reservation with FF7-Remake as a whole; their unwillingness to even give a rough idea how many parts it’s going to be in. It’s not like we’re talking about building a universe from scratch here. You know exactly what you’re working with here.

Mario games, outside of very rare instances, aren’t at all intended to be part of any greater whole. Each game is a fully contained narrative outside of again a few exceptions.

Kind of an apples and oranges comparison you’re trying to make there.

Nojima writes it with Nomura’s direction.  Nomura’s the overall “brain” behind what goes in and what doesn’t.

I played it up until Dream Drop Distance, when it became clear to me that Nomura had no intention whatsoever of wrapping up anything in any meaningful way and would keep throwing whatever half-formed idea came into his head at it until someone at Disney told him, “Okay, that’s enough.”

I’d boil it down even more simply to Nomura (and his colleagues to some extent) still being on their “fight your fate” theme that they’ve been on since... God, Final Fantasy 8, at least, and probably even longer than that.

I’ve since accepted the fact that this series is never going to end. Any plot or theme or greater story that this series might have had has long been since abandoned, and its fans don’t care.

I think this series being his baby is why he feels comfortable with using it to make FF13-Versus happen.

... unless we are the ones doing the ousting, not the platform.

I think you need to be “cool” with it simply because it’s too late to stop it now. That and I would wager that the vast majority of customers would happily trade potentially not being able to play the game they bought ten years from now for the convenience of not having to leave their home or wait for a physical copy…

They do this because gamers have repeatedly demonstrated with their wallets that this is what they want, even as their mouths said otherwise.

I think part of the problem is that a lot of those titles that get so much affection online... weren’t actually particularly good sellers, even at the time.

Well, I do think that there is a somewhat universal, “overcoming trauma and using it as fuel to reach greatness that you might not have even tried otherwise” that is fairly common in literature and narratives.

As a general rule, I have found the people who scream “freedom from speech” actually mean, “freedom from consequences.”

From my experience, it was a neat little game for streamers to play with their audience.  Beyond that, I really can’t imagine it would be all that entertaining to play by yourself.

All the more of a shame when Valve inevitably discontinues support for it after two years, leaving you with a neat little conversation piece and nothing else.